Antonio D'Aquilio

Being in Texel has been a very nice experience, during which we had the opportunity not only to learn from our fellow students and professors, but also from the Texel people. Personally, I was impressed by the meetings we had with the local people from the island. People of different ages came to see the presentations of our ideas for the sustainable transition of Texel. In the first meeting

With the previous eight chapters as preparation, the team left for the project week on Texel. In this week we visited many companies on Texel (the Teso, Texelse Paddestoelenkwekerij, NIOZ and more) spoke to many local people and collected new information. All this gave us new insights and required adjustments of the design we proposed earlier. We discovered that it is very difficult for people…

In the midterm presentation for our sub-systems, some weeks ago, it was clear that the Texel way of dealing with water can actually be improved. What emerged is that a good way is to shift the trend from “using clean water coming from the mainland and wasting the output grey water” to “using the clean water and reusing most of the output water”. As a matter of fact, this is a problem that is…

Many people are already recycling materials like plastic, glass, paper etc., but not many are recycling food. Food scraps account for a big part of the landfilled waste and therefore it accounts also for a big part of co2 emissions. In U.S. for example, scrap food accounts for 20 % of greenhouse gasses emissions. By starting composting you would save a big part of waste food to be landfilled or…

The challenge: Current waste streams need to be reduced and the remaining waste streams need to be dealt with in a way that is both energy efficient and economically feasible. Ambition : To make the island waste wise as self-sufficient as economically feasible, while keeping its identity and potentials. The ambition is to close the loop of waste, looking at what is available on the island and…

A big part of the food that we eat every day has travelled hundreds or thousands of kilometers, before getting in the supermarket from which we bought it. This can be defined quite unsustainable, if we consider the possibilities of growing food locally. For example, the transport of food in U.S. accounts for 25% of the total energy use related to the food industry.[1] Even though transport has an…

When we talk about sustainability, we are basically talking about protecting the natural environment, because of the harm that our industrial society has been doing for the last 200 years. After the industrial revolution, people started thinking that they could take resources from Nature without any limit. We also started thinking that all the highly toxic wastes produced by machines and systems…

What sustainability criteria should the future sub-system meet? The amount of the total waste production on Texel is bigger than other similar municipalities (700kg of annual waste per head, instead of an average of 518kg). The main household waste components are: “green” and “grey” waste, bulky household waste, small-scale chemical waste, electrical and electronic equipment and “dry” components…